- On our last seed starting video,
we did not start nearly enough seeds.
So the straw hat boys are back for another round.
Yes, we are back.
I'm wearing a straw hat.
Jacques, your signature straw hat.
- Gotta wear the hat.
- I don't know who looks better.
I honestly think you look way better
in a straw hat than I do.
Please let us know in the comments.
But last video... (airplane humming)
Earlier this year, we did a seed starting video together,
kind of just starting stuff for both our gardens
here at the homestead,
but also your garden. - Oh, yeah.
- Jacques in the Garden, his YouTube channel.
We didn't start anywhere near
- Not even close. - enough seeds.
Yeah, and it's the thing we always run into.
So I'm gonna start it out Jacques with some flowers.
- Okay. - These ones come from
Antonio Valente, who I think actually has a YouTube channel.
We got in touch and he shipped out a ton of flowers.
- Yeah, I'm actually gonna start
with a little bit of flowers as well,
because the only thing I have at my place
are peppers and tomatoes. - Yeah.
- I have like a full pepper flat, a full tomato flat.
I was like, oh, wait, I'm missing everything else.
- (laughs) Yes.
- And I'm gonna start with one of my favorites
that go with tomatoes, which is the Alyssum or Alissum,
I never know actually how say that.
- I haven't seen you grow that variety before.
- I haven't yet. - What's that variety?
- So this one's called Royal Carpet from San Diego Seed.
So it's purple instead of just white.
And the nice thing about this,
in particular with tomatoes,
is that it actually attracts those parasitic wasps.
- Yeah, the bracketed wasps.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- That attack the tomato horn worm.
So they'll actually take care
of your tomato horn worm problem.
- It looks disgusting, I'll tell you that much.
It does not look attractive.
But it is doing something very valuable for your garden.
So I'm going in with the sunflower first,
this one's Panache.
So with Antonio's flowers,
I think he's growing mostly for cut flower applications.
So maybe a lot of these varieties,
you and I might not have heard of before,
because they're for a use case we typically wouldn't see.
- If you are like allergic to pollen, for instance,
a lot of the cut flower varieties, like the pro cuts,
have no pollen.
So it's great for like putting inside
if you're allergic usually and you want a little color.
- Yeah. In fact, I am going in with this one,
which I've never seen before Pro Cut Plum,
which I'm only, I can only assume
either the petals outside of the main
or the actual interior itself
has some sort of plum-ish color,
which would be fantastic. - Some like purplish.
- All these seeds are kind of small.
With sunflowers, I do depress the soil just a little bit,
cause it's a large seed, but you don't have to soak.
You certainly could soak, but it's not mandatory.
As long as you keep this seed-starting mix here
well watered, they'll germ
and they'll germ actually quite well.
- So the next I'm going is another San Diego Seed,
which is Golden Yarow. - Yeah.
- This is one of these that are sort of
really drought tolerant.
So last year when I planted them,
I put them on like the edges of my garden
where I didn't have any irrigation.
The only downside is a take a really long time
to actually like flower.
So I think I waited like six months or something ridiculous.
So I wanna start a little earlier this time.
I think you have a special little term
for what I'm doing over here.
- Oh yeah, oh yeah, I do.
So Jacques, what are you adding there?
- This is vermiculite.
- So we call it verm for the germ.
Vem to improve germ, verm germ.
- So I'm putting it on these
because they're really small seeds.
And I actually also noticed on the Golden Yarow
that it says that it requires light to germinate.
So the cool thing about this is that
it does light through, unlike soil,
since it's like semi translucent.
And then once you water it, it becomes like a sponge.
So it's a sponge that lets water in,
makes germination like basically much more guaranteed
than if you don't use it.
- Especially if you're in a zone like we are right now
where we're not gonna be moving all these trays indoors
in mid-April, we're just going to let them be out here.
If you do that, what's great is you have the warmth
that you need to germinate,
you have the light you need to germinate,
but like we have this cross breeze coming over right now.
If it does dry out after germination,
the roots, which are very sensitive at that point in time,
can dry out and immediately die.
And so you germ and then immediately kill.
If you put the verm on top,
it's like just a little moisture buffer that helps out.
- Yeah, exactly, it's a little bit of insurance.
And I bought a giant bag a year ago
and I'm still like only a third of the way through it.
So it's lasted me a pretty long time.
- By the way, all the seeds were starting today
are going in our Epic 6-Cell Trays,
at least these right here.
We've got a couple new models out
that I think I'm really personally gonna like.
I think you, tomato, pepper, poppy over here
is really gonna love.
So we have the 4-Cell model, which is three inch deep.
And then we have this new one,
literally got it today in the mail.
This is a four inch deep model,
which I'm gonna be potting up
some tomatoes in as an example,
but also starting directly some melons and squashes,
which really just want a little more room to start out with.
- So right now I'm going in with another Alyssum,
but this one it's called Allure Pastel Blend.
So it looks like there's like a yellowish,
a white, pink and a purple, a little blend.
I like having different colors in the garden.
Just makes it more kind of pleasant to walk around in.
- Jacques found some research suggesting
it was a great interplant between tomatoes.
Which it tended to be, I think in your garden,
it did a little better.
I did basil in between mine that tend to perform better.
Who knows why?
But both work really well.
I just did Pro Cut White Nite, by the way.
So I don't know what that one looks like.
We'll put it up on the screen.
Could look really cool.
So the last one I'm going in with sunflowers
is a Pro Cut Orange.
So just an orange variety or version of the ones
that we've been planting before.
- Sweet.
So now I'm going in with a,
this is like one of these classics,
it's called the Purple Cone Flower.
I got it from Seed Savers Exchange.
This is one that again,
I started last year and it still hasn't flowered.
It's been sitting my garden all winter.
- Really?
- I was just reading and it says
it usually flowers in late summer.
So I think I'm gonna have an insane echinacea
or coneflower explosion in a few months.
But I'm gonna do a couple more for backup.
- So earlier this season, I started queen lime zinnias,
the QLZ as I call it.
And it is one of my favorite flowers actually of all time.
I'm not starting that right now.
I'm starting Oklahoma Salmon and Oklahoma Pink Zinnias.
If you're a flower beginner, Zinnias I think really are
some of the easier ones to grow,
honestly, no matter what your zone is.
- Yeah, they seem to actually, for us at least,
they do well in the winter and summer.
- And the summer. - Like all year.
- Yeah, but as an annual, if you're in a colder zone,
I mean, right about now
is probably an okay time to get them going.
- Yeah.
- They kind of do this thing where they look like
they fully bloomed and they have this sort of flatter
structure to the flower and then the petals
start to develop underneath
and it really comes into this like bulbous type of look,
which is honestly very, very pretty.
And there's multiple flowers per plant.
- Yeah, it's kind of like a second life when it expands.
It's really cool. - Yeah, it's very cool.
- This is Summer Savory.
There's also winter savory.
Winter Savory grows as like a perennial.
I have like four of them in my garden.
But the Summer Savory is like the true,
Bulgarian seasoning herb.
In Bulgarian it's called chubritsa.
- Ooh, say it again.
- Chubritsa. - Ooh.
Chubritsa, did I get it?
- It's a little extra.
(both laugh)
I don't even know how to describe the flavor,
but it's like this second element in a bean dish
that like takes it to another level.
It's used with like mixed salts
to add on like sprinkled on bread with butter.
It's just amazing.
So I'm gonna grow a bunch.
I might do two flats cause last year
I just didn't have enough.
- Two flats? - Or sorry,
- Two sixes? - Two sixes.
- Okay. Okay. Okay.
- Cause I actually wanna give some
to my family members as well as gifts.
So I'm actually really excited about this,
because I got true seeds from Bulgaria.
- That actually brings us to an interesting point.
You know, the reason we're doing this video
for you guys right now, number one,
grab some seeds, you know,
grab a drink or something and start seeds with us.
But also it's because we simply
didn't start enough seeds ourselves.
And when you get all the gear out,
you fill your trays up, you've got your seeds.
You've got a little mascot down here,
Bobca, you wanna say hi?
Look who came to say hi.
Bobca, who used to be, according to Jacque, under his care.
But honestly she ended up here.
So I don't know what says about your caretaker skills.
But anyways, where I was going with that is
start extra seeds to the tune of maybe like 20 ish,
25% more than you think.
Because you can always give them to friends.
And the chances are, you probably won't,
cause you're probably gonna need them yourself.
- I tend to probably go 50% more than I need,
which is a problem.
- Yeah that's a little bit of a problem.
- I just have a really hard time
like getting rid of plants that I don't need.
I just I'm like, I'm gonna keep going.
Even though I don't have anywhere to put it.
- Speaking of, what I'm gonna do now,
is kind of show you the reason
why we came out with this 4 inch tray here.
So Jacques has an abundance of tomatoes like he mentioned,
and he brought these over from his place.
These are in the 6-Cell trays.
So what you can do is if these aren't ready
to go on the ground yet, which I would argue
you could definitely put these in the ground.
You know, what you would do
is you'd pop the tomato out here.
Nice little easy pop there.
And you could split these if you wanted
or you could just sacrifice.
I might like take this one here off
and just let the rest of these go.
But I'd take the seed leaves off
and I'd plant it to about this deep, right?
Yep, so you could do that right now,
but if you weren't ready
or if it was too cold in your climate still,
you could pot it up into one of these larger trays.
This is a little fancy tool we came up with,
it's just something we have here at the homestead,
but what you can do is just pop it in,
Whoop, and you're ready to go.
Now with tomatoes, you probably still would
pot that a little bit deeper.
Or you can just start seeds directly in it,
which is what I'm gonna do right now.
Because I do not have a ton of tomato and pepper seeds.
So I'm gonna start those while you get into
your Bulgarian styles here or is that Bulgarian?
- I got the Summer Savory now,
but so-- - Ooh.
- This is a classic, the amazing grey poppy.
I have a bunch of poppies this year.
Like the Shirley, I don't know.
None of them look as cool as the amazing grey poppy.
I really quite enjoy this one. - Yep.
- And somebody commented and said
that you can't transplant poppies.
I don't know, I have 12 plants in my garden
that are all transplanted.
So there's just like a lot of things
where people will say, you can't do the X,
you can't do Y, but just try it.
There's a lot of things that turn out
to be totally fine. - Yeah.
- And it's just about practice.
- Can't is usually not the case,
I would say with gardening things.
It's more like, why would you?
- Yeah, that's true.
- That's more of it.
It's like, why would you transplant a poppy?
But the reason why is 'cause we have them here,
you might as well, right?
- For me, it's just too difficult
to keep the areas where I want them
moist enough to ensure germination.
So by doing this, I guarantee my germination,
I guarantee I'm gonna have poppies,
and then I can put them wherever I want.
Totally.
Okay, well I'm popping the tomatoes out
and I'm going with Margold F1 from Johnny's Seeds.
So this of course-- - Ooh, that's a fancy one.
- Is it? Oh is this?
- That's a $15 seed pack. - Oh is it?
Okay, I just literally put $8 of your seeds in there.
So sorry.
- It's all right, I already got them going.
- As you guys know on Jacques' channel,
he definitely has a different approach, right?
You're a little bit more repurposed materials,
a little bit more, you know,
how can I stretch the dollar I suppose,
is a good way to put it? - Yeah, absolutely.
- And then you spent $15 on this one pack of seeds here.
So why did you do that?
- So, here's my thinking.
It says, first of all, they are a hybrid.
So they tend to have a lot more disease resistance.
And this one in particular has resistance
to most of the common diseases that you would experience
as a tomato, I guess.
But the other thing is that apparently
they're much more productive
and they produce for longer throughout the season.
So let's say for example, from that tomato,
I get 3X the amount of physical tomato fruits
than a other normal heirloom variety.
Well then, by paying that extra money for that seed,
I'm saving the space that I would otherwise
have to put three tomato plants.
The other thing about this one is that it says that it has
exceptional flavor, similar to like a heirloom tomato.
So for me, that's why I usually don't get
F1s, is 'cause the flavor isn't as good,
but this one specifically called that out.
So more productive, more disease resistant
and still delicious. - Yeah.
- It seems worth it to me.
- So I do just did Black Krim,
which as a darker tomato, is one of the few
I actually really do like.
Some of the other ones I haven't had
as good of an experience with, personally.
- Yeah, there's some of those weird ones
that are like, this is the most purple tomato.
I'm like, okay, does it taste good?
- I'll tell you this though. - No, it doesn't.
- For a while, I feel like there were a couple tomatoes
that were talk of the town.
Atomic grape, I believe.
- Yeah, atomic grape. - Atomic grape.
And look, it's a beautiful tomato.
It looks like, it looks like when you look
at an oil slick from the side
and you see that sort of-- - Beautiful.
- Well, but that color, you know what I'm talking about.
That coloration is kind of what goes across.
And I have to say like, beautiful tomato.
I did not have great experience
with either the production of it or the flavor of it.
- Yeah, the flavor just wasn't there for me.
- That's the thing.
And so it's like, Hmm, am I growing for beauty?
Or am I actually gonna use this stuff?
And it's fine to do either, but it is what it is.
Delicious Hunt did well for us last year, right?
- That's the one, the germ is like a little spotty,
but it's the best, that was the most flavorful tomato
I think we grew last year.
- Okay, yep. So I'm gonna do that.
- So I think it's definitely worth it.
- That's going in.
- I'm going in with a Mother of Pearl poppies.
I guess I'm just going with poppies today.
- You're going full flowers.
I like what you're doing though,
'cause you're going with the verm, the verm germ method.
- I'm doing it right away because the seeds are so small
and t's kind of windy.
I'm actually just scared they're gonna blow away.
- Yeah, why don't we talk about, Jacques,
your seed mix strategy.
- Generally I get high quality potting mix
and then I'll throw in maybe like if I filter
like a whole, like one and a half cubic foot bag,
I'll throw like two scoops of this, like this size,
which is like 30 ounces of worm castings.
And then I'll do like a scoop of that of azomite.
So the idea behind that is that the worm castings
give like a light fertilizer,
not like anything that would like over fert a seed.
And then, the azomite kind of gives it
a little bit of that trace elements
that it might be missing.
It's not anything that's like required by any means,
but I personally have had good success with it.
That's how I got my tomatoes to look so
kind of luscious and large this year.
- Well here's what's interesting about that
is it does fly in the face of what most people do though,
which is buying or sterilizing a mix.
Which you know, I've seen other people
on YouTube talk about that.
And if I think about it from like a first principal's
perspective, I go, why would you do that?
Why would you sterilize the mix to introduce it
into a garden that's full of life,
both in the soil and above.
- Yeah, and the reason why I started doing that,
because I thought conventional wisdom says
that that's what you're supposed to do, right?
But then I noticed, as I was reading
these books from farmers,
like every single farmer will start,
they'll make their own mix.
And in that mix they'll almost always use compost
and some sort of like little fertility boost.
I was like, oh, okay, so it's fine.
So I started doing it, and it's been fine.
- I'm going with something a little special.
I don't know if this is perfect timing.
We've got 95 plus days of maturity,
which puts us around July-ish,
so maybe this is crop one of these,
but this is a rainbow mix of pumpkins.
- Oh, okay, cool.
- So I'm going in with pumpkins
and this is why I want to use the four inch deep 4-Cell.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
- Because it just makes way more sense
to do it in a larger thing because it's a huge seed.
- So check out these bean seeds.
- Ooh, ooh.
- So these are from Bulgaria,
but it says Capitano, which I,
I know they look really cool.
- They look like Willie Wonka invented that thing.
- But what's funny is that
I've had Capitano bean seeds before
and they were not like this.
I think they were like just white beans.
So I don't know what the difference is,
but they make like a, one of those
like filet-style, yellow beans.
- I think you have a BMO,
a Bulgarian modified organism right there.
(both laugh)
That's a BMO.
- I think I'm gonna do two trays.
And I do transplant beans sometimes.
I think we did a trial actually last year.
- We did a trial, so here's what we learned.
- I can't remember.
- We did a perfect experiment, I would say,
as perfect as you can get the garden at our scale.
But we did a 50/50 transplanted in beans
and direct sown beans
and harvested at the same time so we knew.
So here's what we noticed.
Basically they ended up evening out.
But the period before they evened out
was like very awkward, right?
Because the direct sown ones
germed a little quicker, I think.
And they didn't have that situation with beans
where, when you transplant it in,
it's like where's my nitrogen for a while,
and then it finally hooks.
So you get these lower leaves that end up yellowing.
And then, that's what ended up happening.
So we thought, oh maybe the transplants won't work.
And then they kicked and then they kind of matched.
So honestly that's another one of those things
where it's like, does it actually matter or not?
I'm just gonna go more pumpkins.
This is the variety of champions,
go for the neighborhood record.
Let's be honest.
I've seen the neighborhood.
I could grow a one pound pumpkin, I'd have the record.
But we're going with,
oh actually you're in the neighborhood.
I'm still gonna stand by it.
- Actually, I don't know.
I haven't gone hard on pumpkins.
- I think I could get you on squash.
- I think you could. - Yeah.
- Anyways, Big Max.
So this one, let's see what it says.
- Big max.
- 120 Days, that's perfect.
- I'm gonna do one more bean pack from Bulgaria.
How about you pronounce this?
I think you got better pronunciation than I do.
- Oh yeah, yeah.
Meraviglia di venezia.
- There it is.
- That's pretty good, right?
- That's pretty good.
So it looks like they're again, the yellow beans,
but these ones are longer.
So every time I've had beans like this,
I've always thought they taste really good.
So I've never grown them.
So let's see if that holds up in the garden.
- So Sungold is an F1.
This one's outta Johnny's, but I believe,
I believe you can get it elsewhere, right?
- Yeah they have them all over.
- You can get Sungold elsewhere.
Seeds are tiny and relatively pricey, right?
- Yeah, they are like a hybrid from Japan.
It's one of those that allegedly the genetics
are slipping a little bit.
- Widely considered one of the best tasting cherry
tomatoes that you'll ever have so.
- Personally, I think they're the best
cherry tomato I've had too. - Really?
- They're not just sweet.
Like a lot of cherry tomatoes are like simply sweet.
They're sweet, but they have like a savory
and like a little bit of sourness, like tartness to them.
- I was over at Jacques' garden
when we did the tour of his place last year
on the main Epic Gardening channel.
And let's just say I did a little snacking.
A little, little surreptitious snacking.
He did not see it, but it doesn't really matter.
- I'm just hearing about it now I guess.
- Yeah well, hey, I've seen him wandering off the property
with some organic materials, let me say that much.
- I'll tell you right now,
I'm gonna be leaving with some low cloths, so.
I don't know if there's anything to stop me.
- See what I mean?
See what I mean? This guy.
Honestly, we dock it from his pay, it's all good.
Anyways, I think I'm in a good position here.
A couple things, Jacques has his own YouTube channel,
Jacques in The Garden.
He's doing videos, I think every Tuesday and Sunday now.
- Yep, that's the plan.
- We have our Epic Homesteading channel.
We're gonna do two videos a week there,
two videos a week on the Epic Gardening channel here.
And of course, if you like the stuff we're doing here,
you can actually support.
You can grab some of these Epic 6-Cell trays.
We have the four inch deep and the three inch deep
4-Cells that are just flying right now.
- I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna fly over
and get a 32 pack of those cause I've got a lot
- And they're gonna sell out.
Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching.
Hopefully this was like a fun little
vibe with us seed starting session.
Until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
(upbeat music)